the coming of age, bildungsroman-esque blog of an
American-born, Vietnamese Catholic male

Thursday, May 17

iPhone, It Mostly Works

Okay, I'll concede that the iPhone 4/4S is damn sexy, especially the white one. It's extra sexy when combined with a barely-there case. A good many people put those large, clunky otterbox cases, but it's akin to putting a supermodel in an XXL puffy jacket. Why, people, why? And those with no protection leave nothing to the imagination. So yes, I bought into the flagship of the Apple culture, but after just a couple months, I'm ready to jump ship.

Some gripes:

No app cache clearing. Facebook and other large apps can take a huge toll on the non-expandable 8gb (6.4gb actual) memory allotment. It would be nice to have the option to clear cached memory from time to time to increase speed, which is a standard option on the Android platform. iPhone, nope. It will automatically clear it whenever it feels like it, which is almost never. And I'm not doing the delete & reinstall workaround. It defeats the ease that Apple promises.

No forcing of full sites. I think Safari is one of the best smartphone browsers available. And surfing on the iPhone is vastly more pleasurable than using Android's default browser. But you can't force the iPhone to display full sites natively; you always have to click the "Display Full Site" option from the default mobile site. Now Chase.com refuses to offer such option so you're stuck with the crappy mobile site. Android has a workaround to always display full sites for that stupid company that refuses to acknowledge the computing power of newer smartphones. (I guess this is more of a complaint against Chase).

No sorting in packaged Reminders app. Every other pre-installed app has an option to reorder items, why not this one? For such a sleek & elegant system, this is a glaring omission/mistake.

Ease of transferring photos & creating albums natively. I spent a good couple hours trying to figure out how to get pictures from the phone onto my PC in an efficient manner. If it just works, then it should be intuitive to figure out. I'm far from a techie, but I'm no idiot when it comes to technology. Suggestions: list the iPhone as an external HD (Apple will never do this), show pictures tab in iTunes like they have for ebooks & music, have an import/export feature from iTunes. Oh forget about creating albums from Camera Roll on the phone itself. Not an option. UPDATE: I take this back. You can create albums in Camera Roll. Don't rely on discussion topics from 2009. Oopsy! :)
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I've looked and there are countless discussion topics dedicated to these issues. And unlike Android which seems to be a more open platform, with Apple you're stuck with what they give you. There is an update I'm currently downloading (taking forever, btw), but I doubt it will fix any of these problems no matter how much demand there is.

For me, the iPhone is like a really attractive trophy wife who is extremely uptight and stubborn. The things she chooses to do, she will do well and quite elegantly. But there are things you know are possible that she will absolutely refuse to do, no matter how much research & finagling you try. You just have to enjoy her beauty and live with her faults. Or divorce her in 21 months and get the newer, sexier Android model.

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